Seagate's SD1A firmware bricking 500GB Barracudas

The fiasco surrounding Seagate's 7200.11 drives appears to be getting even worse. There are numerous reports that the latest firmware update available from Seagate is bricking certain drives. The 500GB model of the series appears to be the only one affected, which has resulted in many upset customers on Seagate's forums, with numerous people looking for a way to un-brick the dead drives.

No official answers have come from Seagate yet as to how the drives can be fixed, if at all, without sending them in for warranty replacement. They have, however, pulled the SD1A firmware from their site while they investigate the cause of the problem. With the number of people suffering from bricked drives, you'd imagine that Seagate's QA would have caught such a glaring error. I personally have flashed several 7200.11 drives using the SD1A firmware with success, but those were all 1TB and larger drives.
Seagate has already stated that they will offer data recovery services for damaged drives. Is that enough, however? Will Seagate's reputation suffer from this incident?